Residential, commercial, and industrial locations can include a variety of appliances. For example, refrigerator appliances, microwave appliances, oven appliances, water heater appliances, HVAC appliances and the like can be provided at such locations. Conventionally, such appliances were stand alone and incapable of communicating with any other device.
More recently, appliances have included network interface devices and microcontrollers or microprocessors that allow the appliances to communicate with one another and other devices over the network. Such communications can facilitate operation of the appliances. However, such communications have been limited.
Thus, methods for detecting proximity of a mobile device and an appliance would be useful. In particular, methods for detecting proximity of a mobile device and an appliance and for operating the appliance and/or the mobile device when the mobile device and appliance are positioned proximate each other would be useful.